web analytics

Author: C .T.

Categories
Lightning and the Sun (book)

The Lightning

and the Sun, 2

CHAPTER XIII

THE STRUGGLE FOR TRUTH

Whether alive or dead in the flesh, the predestined Child of Braunau — Adolf Hitler, — lives forever in National Socialism, his creation and integral expression. To understand the latter is to understand him: to see him in the proper light and to place him — whether one be, personally, attracted to him or not, — on the proper level and in the proper class among the galaxy of exceptionally great men. And that is precisely what most National Socialists, even those who remained after 1945, irreproachable in their profession of faith — even ‘fanatical’ ones — (let alone our enemies, and the world at large, which lies for the last ten years under their influence), apparently fail to do, out of lack off, feeling for cosmic realities and, in particular, out of lack of awareness of the rhythm of Time which explains all laws of history, when not also all great happenings.

One should carefully distinguish the ephemeral N.S.D.A.P., — the National Socialist German Workers Party;[1] an organisation in view of precise aims, which have their place in German and European history, — from the everlasting National Socialist Idea.

The Party came (officially) into existence on the 24th of February 1920; in fact, already in 1919. It was a revolutionary body determined to win power for its Leader — and for its members, — to rid Germany of the enslavement and shame resulting from the Versailles Treaty, and — for the first time in the history of the West, — to apply, on a broad scale, solid — eternal — biological principles to social and to political life. It had, however, the characteristics of even the very best organisations of our Dark Age: their inherent clumsiness; their all-too-human short-comings. There were all sorts of people — fearless idealists and time-servers; heroes, nay, demi-gods, and an immense majority of irresponsible, sheep-like creatures, and a few influential traitors — among the thirteen million members it had at the height of its glory. It achieved a lot, and yet it failed. It has, since 1945, ceased to exist as a body, and even if it be, one day, destined to rise again under its old name and everlasting Sign, will never be restored exactly as before. Cannot be; for it belongs to Time, and in Time nothing is ever restored. Should not be; for restoration would mean stagnation, whence incapacity to face new circumstances and overcome new dangers.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s interpolated note: We shouldn’t take texts like Mein Kamp or Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century as an infallible New Testament as fundamentalists take the Bible; rather, NS is continually developing and refining its basic and fundamental principles (for example, what we say in ‘The Wall’ about the historical non-existence of Jesus of Nazareth).
 

______ 卐 ______

 
The National Socialist Idea is not the Party. Not only was it in existence — ‘in the air’ — more or less in its present-day garb, before the Party (the Proclamation of Friedrich Lange’s ‘Deutsches Bund,’ in Heidelberg, on the 9th of May 1894 — when Adolf Hitler was five years old — has all the traits of a National Socialist Manifesto; and so have Hans Krebs’ declarations in 1904), but it is, in its essence, as old as the oldest contact and first clash between the Germanic race and the outer world. Fundamentally, it is nothing else but the expression of the collective will of the race to survive and to rule; of its readiness to combat and eradicate all that which, from without or from within, stands in the way of its survival and expansion; of its healthy consciousness of itself — of its strength; of its youth; — and of Godhead within itself: a biological reality stressed in political and in social life, rather than a ‘political’ idea. One could say that Theodoric the Great acted in the true National Socialist spirit when, fourteen hundred years before the famous ‘Nüremberg Laws,’ he did all he possibly could to prevent marriages between his Goths and the racially less pure — less Aryan — people of conquered Italy, let alone people of altogether non-Aryan stock.

______ 卐 ______

Editor’s interpolated note: Old time Nordicism! Those who haven’t read William Pierce’s book Who We Are should read it now.

______ 卐 ______

 
And I have many times and in different writings pointed out that there is no difference in purpose and in standpoint between the National Socialist attitude to life and that of the ancient, warrior-like Aryans, worshippers of Light, who were conquering North-West India, setting the caste-system, conceived on a racial basis, between themselves and the conquered people, and praying the Vedic Gods for ‘many sons,’ prosperous flocks, and ‘victory over the dark-skinned Dasyus’ — for Lebensraum — several thousands of years before 1919, 1933, or 1935.

One could go a step further and state that, in its essence, the National Socialist Idea exceeds not only Germany and our times, but the Aryan race and mankind itself and any epoch; that it ultimately expresses that mysterious and unfailing Wisdom according to which Nature lives and creates: the impersonal Wisdom of the primaeval forest and of the ocean-depth, and of the spheres in the dark fields of Space; and that it is Adolf Hitler’s glory not merely to have gone back to that divine Wisdom, — stigmatising man’s silly infatuation for ‘intellect,’ his childish pride in ‘progress’ and his criminal attempt to enslave Nature, — but to have made it the basis of a practical regeneration-policy of world-wide scope, precisely now, in our over-crowded, over-civilised, and technically over-evolved world, at the very end of the Dark Age.

In other words, it is impossible to understand National Socialism unless one integrates it into the cyclic conception of history as suggested by Tradition, i.e., unless one sees in it not a political system among many others, — not an ephemeral ‘ism,’ product of ephemeral circumstances, — but the last, (or, as we shall see, the one before the last) effort of the permanent and more-than-human Forces of Life within this Time-cycle, against the accelerated current of degeneracy characteristic of any advanced development in Time, or, in one sentence, unless one sees in it the effort ‘against Time’ at the very end of the last Age of our present Cycle.

Seen in this light, the whole well-known struggle to free Germany from the enslavement to which the Versailles Treaty had reduced her, — the National Socialist struggle for ‘freedom and bread’ (and far space); for the German people’s right to thrive in healthy creative activity, — is the last (or, rather, as we shall see, the one before the last) phase of the perennial Struggle for Truth within the present Time-cycle the form which that perennial Struggle was bound to take at our epoch, i.e., at the end of the Dark Age. And Adolf Hitler is the most heroic of the heroes who, in the course of history, stood in the way of the world’s fated downward rush towards its doom; the One Who comes back, in His last desperate attempt to save that which is still worth saving, before it is too late, — the typical Man ‘against Time.’ He embodies that eternal Nature-wisdom to which I have alluded in the former paragraph — the only wisdom that deserves the name of divine, and opposed it, — not human arguments, — to the false science, and false religion and false morality and, of course, also false political conceptions of our decadent Age, and made Germany’s struggle for freedom the occasion of a broader systematic struggle for the liberation of higher mankind from the chains of the Dark Age. And made the Sign of the Sun — the Sign of Health[2] — the Symbol of both German and Aryan regeneration, and Germany, the holy Land of the West — the Stronghold of regenerate Aryandom.

Considered as the twentieth century expression of the age-old yearning of Aryan mankind to free itself, here and at once, from the appalling determinism of decay, National Socialism begins before Adolf Hitler’s political career. Its unrecorded but real evolution as an incarnate Idea, — its true history — starts with the future German Führer’s gradual awakening to the consciousness of his own scale of values, of his fundamental aspirations and repulsions, and of his mission: the awakening of the Man ‘against Time,’ as such.

_________

[1] Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter Partei.

[2] The Swastika, ‘Swasthi,’ Sanskrit, meaning: ‘health,’ ‘well-being.’

Categories
Sticky post

WW2

The Allies genocided more Germans than the Germans genocided Jews. See this book review about the Holocaust of German civilians, women and children included, perpetrated by the Allies—even after 1945! Once you have assimilated the reality of this Holocaust that almost no one talks about, read the featured article of this site, ‘The Wall’.

Categories
Martin Kerr

Edited

I have edited the featured article ‘The Wall’ originally posted on January 1st. It originally contained this sentence:

How many are legitimate heirs, like Savitri, of the religion bequeathed to us by the avatar of Vishnu? None that I know of, if we take into account Martin Kerr’s definition of National Socialism: a way of life devoted body and soul to the fulfilment of the sacred words!

Emphasis added. I have changed that sentence to this one:

How many are legitimate heirs, like Savitri, of the religion bequeathed to us by the avatar of Vishnu? Apparently there are two of us, if we consider Martin Kerr’s definition of a genuine National Socialist: a way of life dedicated body and soul to the fulfilment of sacred words.

The reason for this change is the recent visit I received from a European, as we saw in the entries ‘Ancient Mexico’ and ‘Teotihuacan’. So I have reposted ‘The Wall’ this August day, with the above modification.

Taking vows before the sacred tree.

If you want to take your vows and become the third priest of the sacred words, you know the price…

Gens alba conservanda est

Eliminemos todo sufrimiento innecesario

Categories
3-eyed crow

The Wall

‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. —William Faulkner

‘Why were you so ungrateful to our Gods as to desert them for the Jews?’ —Roman Emperor Julian, addressing the Christians

‘Like a lethal bacillus, Christianity is locked in a two-thousand-years-long death struggle with the white race, and only one or the other can emerge victorious. The infection must be shaken off, or the race is doomed’. —Robert Morgan

 
In George Martin’s fantasy novels, the Wall is an immense wall of ice stretching from east to west in the north of Westeros, separating the Seven Kingdoms from the wilds beyond.
It is considered one of the nine wonders created by man, but my appropriation of some characters from the A Song of Ice and Fire universe would upset the anti-Nazi George Martin. In my appropriation, the Wall symbolises the white man’s mental block due to Christian morality.
 

First migration

We could start our journey of deprogramming such morality in the direction of the Wall by reading carefully Thomas Goodrich’s Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947.

I discovered Goodrich’s book thanks to an American white nationalist webzine. I approached the Wall in 2010 and began to devise ways to cross it. Psychologically, it is very difficult to approach the Wall, even if you stay in the comfort zone, the south side, the fertile ground. Due to Christian morality, the white man considers it disloyal to worry about a real holocaust that, at the hands of the Allies, the Germans of the last century suffered, including women and children, the subject of Hellstorm: the greatest secret in modern history.

A book review of Tom’s book can be read in the webzine Counter-Currents, here. This review is the starting point of our journey; without taking this first step it will be impossible for the normie adventurer to reach our destination.

How many have approached the Wall, even if they remain on the south side, educated in white nationalist forums such as American Renaissance or The Occidental Observer? Quite a few, it seems, according to their comments section and other less serious nationalist sites.
 

Second migration

It is one thing to believe in the sacred words of David Lane, and another to cross the immense Ice Wall. This can be done via a tunnel under it, while white nationalists have decided to stay in the comfort zone. By contrast, the National Socialists of the last century dared to cross the Wall to populate the northern side.

Although Adolf Hitler was their guiding star, in his book for the masses of Protestant and Catholic Germans, Mein Kampf, he wasn’t entirely outspoken insofar as it is not an anti-Christian manifesto. The second migration, going under the tunnel, requires the reading of a more frank and anti-Christian text: Hitler’s Table Talk (our translation of the introduction to the German edition can be read here). I would also suggest the book of Hitler’s priestess Savitri Devi, who, after the catastrophe of 1945, came to grasp the spirit of Hitlerism perfectly. See our abridged Memoirs and Reflections of an Aryan Woman, linked in the list below the swastikas of this article (the full text in French can be read here; the complete translation into Spanish, here).

Taking all this into consideration, who has crossed the tunnel? That is, who, among the white nationalists, has been disappointed by this stagnation south of the Wall and converted, like Savitri, to Hitler’s religion? Since it is forbidden in totalitarian Europe to speak out in favour of National Socialism, it is impossible to calculate the figure in the Old World. And as far as the country of the First Amendment is concerned, I am afraid to say that the neo-Nazis got stuck in the tunnel.

Who, among them, crossed it in the sense of transvaluing Christian values to pre-Christian values (cf. The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour also linked below)? More specifically, who maintains that the extermination of races that stand in the way of an Aryan Reich is a moral enterprise given the new scale of values? What they do is the opposite: many of these Christians and neochristian secular humanists have become holocaust deniers when what we need are holocaust affirmers who follow in the footsteps of Mark Weber, the head of the Institute for Historical Review, even if Weber isn’t exactly a priest of the holy words or an exterminationist like us.[1]

He who has transvalued his values endorses not only Heydrich’s Wannseekonferenz but Himmler’s Generalplan Ost or General Plan East: a secret Nazi plan of ethnic cleansing, the aim of which was to deport more than thirty million Untermenschen from the western parts of the Soviet Union to Siberia. The plan, prepared during the years 1939-1940, was part of Hitler’s dream of expanding the German Lebensraum[2] to create, with the help of his loyal SS, a beautiful Eastern and Western Europe populated by Nordics: a utopia such as I have, since December 1978, dreamed with Parrish’s paintings!

So, I repeat: Who has recently crossed the tunnel, who has turned to Hitler’s faith without atavisms of Christian morality? I guess they could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and perhaps some of them have even commented on this site.
 

Third migration

It is one thing to cross the Wall—an axiological metamorphosis in which the Christian compass of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is replaced by Heydrich- and Himmler-like Hitlerism—and another to meet the three-eyed raven.

Even on the other side of the wall, Hitlerism’s top ideologues were still talking about ‘God’, or that the historical Jesus might have had Aryan blood. Hitler himself believed the story that Mary could have been impregnated by a Roman soldier with Gallic blood. Never mind that Hitler wasn’t a Christian but a pantheist (see the PDF listed below, our excerpts from Hitler’s Religion), or that this semi-Aryan Jesus was, in his imagination, a mere mortal. The very fact that, in speaking of deity, he and other top National Socialists continued to use the singular ‘God’ implied, for the German mass imagery, a monotheistic entity: a late tail of Judaeo-Christianity.

When speaking about the deity, an entirely transvalued overman already uses the word ‘Gods’, in the plural, like those of the Delphic Oracle, and even ‘god’ with lowercase when alluding to the despicable god of the Hebrews. Similarly, to believe that a semi-Aryan Jesus confronted the Temple Jews is itself a residue of kike programming because it suggests that this historical Jesus might have been benign to our cause. The reality is that it was the Jews themselves who wrote the so-called New Testament and invented that literary character. (See what David Skrbina says in Neo-Christianity, also linked below: one of our most important PDFs for understanding the West’s darkest hour. And even more important is what Tom Holland says in that very same PDF.)

In Martin’s novel, after crossing the Wall Bran Stark and his guardians find guides who lead them to the cave of the three-eyed raven (actually a human telepath), who offers to train Bran in retrocognition and out-of-body experiences: the last ‘greenseer’ who can, paranormally, see the past as it happened. Anyone who has seen the past by studying Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt knows that Jesus was a character of pure literary fiction, probably from the pen of rabbis (watch a conference by Carrier here).

What is infinitely worse, in our collective unconscious (I was raised Catholic) the Jesus archetype has inverted Indo-European values to the values of the subversive Jews who wrote the gospel. See the long essay by a Spaniard on Rome and Judea in The Fair Race (sample page: here) and pay special attention to the quotations from Nietzsche.

Had Hitler won the war, his spiritual descendants wouldn’t have stayed so close to the Wall, though already firmly settled on the northern side. One among them would have followed the long and arduous path that Bran travelled inland until he reached the mysterious cave of the raven. That, and that alone, would have represented the final initiation of the adventurer who migrated from the warm lands south of Westeros. He had come to the Wall to—unlike the stagnant Southerners—cross it to seek and find the last of the greenseers and be initiated into the ancient religion that existed before the arrival of those who destroyed the sacred trees.

How many National Socialists have been initiated in the raven’s cave to the extent that they have retrocognitively ‘scanned’ not only the career of Judea’s governor Pontius Pilate (with the crow’s third eye it was possible to see that even a human, all too human Jesus was missing from the historical record), but also what the Judaeo-Christians did throughout the Roman Empire: destroy the classical world (see also Deschner’s books, linked below)? How many have become ultimate apostates of Christianity, cutting off the tail end of the last atavisms of semi-apostasy (e.g., Alfred Rosenberg’s views of an Aryan Jesus)? How many have knelt before their true Gods, begging for forgiveness for having committed the mortal sin of worshipping the god of their enemies for two thousand years? How many are legitimate heirs, like Savitri, of the religion bequeathed to us by the avatar of Vishnu?

______ 卐 ______

 
Below, the PDF books of our Daybreak Press in the order in which they were published. When more funds come in, or more sponsors want to support this site, they will be available in print again:

Day of Wrath (May 20, 2014 / Revised July 2020)

The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour (May 2014 / Revised July 2023)

Christianity’s Criminal History Vol I (2018 / Revised 2022)

Daybreak (September 2020 / Revised November 2022)

On Exterminationism (December 2020 / Revised March 2023)

On Beth’s Cute Tits (June 2021 / Revised August 2022)

Neo-Christianity (June 2023)

Christianity’s Criminal History Vol II (10 July 2023)

Memoirs and Reflections of an Aryan Woman (11 July 2023)

American Racialism (24 July 2023)

Excerpts from Hitler’s Religion by Richard Weikart (August 2023)

Crusade against the Cross: The tragic life of Nietzsche (June 2024).

 

On the author of this website (Metapedia article here)

How was it that from the age of seventeen, in 1976, I embarked on such an anti-Christian journey and now what I most long for is my day of wrath? The autobiographical Letter to mom Medusa (Revised English translation: August 2022) is the only one of our books that isn’t available in PDF, but a hard copy still can be obtained here. My other autobiographical books are also available in print, although they haven’t yet been translated into English: a task that I will continue next year.

___________________

[1] The historian Mark Weber, the director of the Institute for Historical Review, now accepts that homicidal gassings happened in some death camps and is basically on the same page as historian David Irving. Alas, since Irving became ill this year, his family has hinted that his second biographical volume on Herr Himmler won’t be completed (but we can watch his DVD on Himmler). See also Weber’s interview with a denier, Jim Rizoli. After minute 52 Weber speaks of the gassings; after 1:08 he says that between 2 and 4 million Jews died, although not necessarily murdered by the Germans but died in the ghettos from diseases, unhealthy conditions, etc.

[2] Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, whose philosophy and policies were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s (see On Exterminationism, linked above, pages 117-129).

Categories
Gaedhal (commenter)

Anti-Oliver!

by Gaedhal

Mark Lester played the title role in Oliver

We are disenfranchised. We will become a minority in our own homelands. It is far too late in the day to reverse this through electioneering. Thus, rioting is a tool—an extremely imperfect, and error-prone tool, of having our voices heard. However, war is error-prone. In wars, innocent bystanders always get hurt. In war, there will always be collateral damage. This is regrettable. However, we are in a war for the 14 words. What Southport demonstrates is that our homelands are no longer a fit habitat for white children. In Southport, we failed to provide a future for three white children, such that they were stabbed to death by a Rwandan sub-human.

The beauty of the white woman must never perish from the earth. Look to the grave of Ashling Murphy, almost goddess-like in beauty, stabbed to death by a Romo (descended from Injuns) sex-crazed gypsy.

Voting harder will not solve anything. You cannot vote your way out of a genocide. You cannot vote your way out of a situation that you never voted your way into, to begin with. You cannot beat democrats at their own game. Democracy is a system designed, from top to bottom, to keep guys like you, me, Alex Linder, and Uncle Adolf, permanently out of power. We have just had 14 years of Conservative rule. If anything, the rate of the Great Replacement went up during that time. The great cities are already ‘majority minority’ to employ an Orwellian phrase.

Note though that whilst leftists will provide political cover for rioters on the left, conservatives never provide the same political cover for rioters on the right. Conservatives never quote the apotheosised Docktah Mautee in Looter Kiying to excuse the desperate actions of disenfranchised whites. Conservatives are not on our side… indeed, they are in direct competition with us. As Alex put it: Nazism is the only sensible politics for young white straight men.

If Hitler had won, those three girls might have been fluent in German as a second language. However, thanks to allied victory, they are the sport and prey of wild dangerous negro subhumans. Mr Churchill: I would much prefer English children to speak German—which itself, like English, is an Anglo-Saxon language—rather than their being the sport and prey of Rwandans, Pakistanis, etc.

Categories
Aryan beauty Film

This

…is the world we lost when we started hating the fair race!

As a child (I’m exactly Mark Lester’s age), with my family and on the big screen, we saw this movie about six times.

Categories
Pre-Columbian America

Teotihuacan

The touristic tour of two adepts of the sacred words continues, but first I must confess that yesterday’s post contains an error. The figures showing the heads of the gods Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc that appear in the last image of my previous post are not on the Pyramid of the Sun as I said yesterday, but on the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl as I just discovered with my own eyes (today we climbed to the top of the latter pyramid). I didn’t remember it because since I was a child I hadn’t climbed these pyramids. The following is a photo that the commenter took today:

Pyramid of the Sun, 65 meters high (213 feet).

Below is a scale model in the Teotihuacan museum that we also visited today, where you can see a reproduction of the Pyramid of the Sun in reddish colour, another photo of the commenter:

By the way, Teotihuacan is not to be confused with Tenochtitlan, whose image appears at the top of my previous post.

Walking all over the archaeological zone of Teotihuacan this day sunburnt our white skins, something I am feeling even now as I write. We should have bought a pair of hats!

Categories
Pre-Columbian America

Ancient Mexico

This is what Mexico City looked like before the arrival of the Spaniards: the lake city of the Aztecs.

A commenter on this site has visited me in Mexico City. This day I showed him the Museum of Anthropology, where we saw the pre-Hispanic art and artefacts of Mesoamerica: the Indian civilisation of serial killers that inhabited the continent before the arrival of the white man.

Many entries appear on this site under the heading of ‘Pre-Columbian America’. To avoid overwhelming the reader with so much information, I suggest reading the central part of my book Day of Wrath starting on page 63, where I deal with this culture. Here I would like to post the pictures that the commenter took today:

This image requires an explanation. The Mesoamerican Amerindians were obsessed with human sacrifice, blood and beheadings. Here we see a freshly beheaded victim. The pre-Hispanic artist depicted the blood gushing from the beheaded body like snakes.

This other image is the reproduction in the museum of what the skirts of the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan looked like: one of the major archaeological centres of Mesoamerica, which flourished between 100 b.c.e. and 650 c.e. Tomorrow the commenter and I will visit this pyramid, although erosion has erased the colour.

Whoever believes in the holy words and would like me to give him or her a tour of these sights, let me know. In what is now the United States, the Amerindians never established great civilisations, though they were as cruel as the Mesoamericans. For this reason, Mexico and Peru may be of particular interest to tourists who want to visit the site of an exotic culture that no longer exists. The large museum that contains the pictures above and the pyramids we will visit tomorrow are not far from the US (unlike the archaeological sites of the pre-Columbian Peruvian culture).

Categories
'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 43

Hitler also worked to expand his international links. These were partly designed to secure funding. One of the figures of whom Hitler had high hopes was the American automobile tycoon and Democratic Party Congressional candidate Henry Ford, who not only symbolized the kind of national productive capitalism he so admired but was an active anti-Semite into the bargain. His book, translated as Der internationale ]ude (1921), had been a great success in Germany. It was well known at the time that Hitler kept a portrait of Ford in his office, and there was talk of inviting the American to speak.

His overtures to Ford were a failure. According to Robert D. Murphy, US vice consul in Munich, who met Hitler in early March 1923, ‘Mr Ford’s organization had so far made no money contributions to the party’ and ‘his funds were principally contributed by patriotic Germans living abroad’. Press reports spoke of Nazi hopes for ‘America’ and a joint struggle against Jews and capitalism. At the end of August 1923, Hitler travelled to Switzerland in search of financial backing. ‘Hitler is very engaging,’ one of the ladies of the house of a wealthy Swiss supporter noted in her diary, ‘his whole body trembles when he speaks,’ which he did ‘wonderfully’. Hitler told the Swiss general Wille: ‘I will strike in the autumn’…

Hitler tried to win over the Americans through a series of interviews. In mid-August 1923 he gave a fire­ breathing interview to the New York World promising a ‘fascist dictatorship’ and demanding that ‘officialdom must be reduced to a minimum’, perhaps a sop to the ‘small government’ preferences of his American readers.

These overtures suggest that Hitler’s overwhelmingly negative image of Anglo-America had given way to a more positive attitude. This was partly tactically motivated, because he realized that his domestic aims could only be achieved with the support or at least the toleration of London and Washington.

Categories
Eduardo Velasco

Heartland, 3

by Eduardo Velasco

 
Endorheic basins and the importance of river systems

The word endorheic comes from the Greek ἔνδον (éndon, internal) and ῥεῖν (rheîn, to flow). The second word shares a root with the Rhine and Rhea, a chthonic primordial goddess in Greek mythology. An endorheic river basin is thus an internal flow basin or, if you prefer, a closed-loop basin, where waters don’t spill into the seas, but remain enclosed until they flow into terminal central ‘navels’, especially lakes (often saline, such as the Caspian, the Dead Sea or Great Salt Lake), cave systems, underground streams, aquifers, oases, swamps, quicksands and other enclosed spaces. Unlike other river basins, which are open to an ocean and therefore imperfect, endorheic basins are perfect water-holding basins, closed caverns where water currents flowing over the surface can neither enter nor leave.

If the world within conventional sea basins represents the waste, change and explosion of the perishable (‘our lives are the rivers that flow into the sea, which is death’, wrote Jorge Manrique in the 15th century), within endorheic continental basins it represents the conservation, fermentation, cultivation and implosion of the perennial. Indeed, civilisation itself, whose essence is becoming and dilapidation, was born in sea basins: that of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf—although interestingly, Jericho, the first city in the archaeological record with walls, towers and fortifications, arose in a small endorheic basin: that of the Dead Sea.

Endorheic basins usually correspond to dry climatologies, since in areas of frequent rainfall, these basins overflow through their lowest outlet, connecting to a conventional basin, or eroding the barrier of least resistance until they find a hydrological outlet (as happened with the Black Sea, formerly a lake, after the last ice age). In dry climates, water evaporates or is absorbed by the subsoil before this can happen. For this reason, humid Europe has hardly any endorheic basins (although the Caspian accounts for 19 per cent of European territory), and these are generally tiny exceptions such as the Akrotiri salt lake in Cyprus, where the UK maintains a Gibraltar-like strategic enclave. In Spain, endorheic systems are small, such as Los Monegros (Aragon) or the Puerto Real Endorheic Complex (Cadiz).

Endorheic basins of the planet.

In geostrategy, river basins aren’t a random or capricious criterion, since they show better than any other force of gravity, that is, the influence of the Earth when driving power. The reason why we will pay so much attention to river basins in this article is that Nature and the will of the Earth always win out in the end—and river basins are an expression of these forces, as their waters descend in obedience to the gravitational pull of the simplest and most logical route.

In Chinese writing, political order is expressed by the ideograms ‘river’ (water element) and ‘dam’ (earth element). The river represents the ‘chaotic’ forces of Nature, which try to be controlled and contained by human civilisation, by ‘order’. As echoed in modern geopolitics many millennia later, rivers are supranational political systems: not for nothing do river basins cross borders, channel goods, influences, technology, armies, religions, ideologies, animals, economies and strategies, as well as provide fertile, wetland on which to grow grain. It was on the banks of the Jordan River that the first proto-civilised societies were born, the Tigris and especially the Euphrates formed the backbone of Mesopotamian civilisations and the Nile was and is the backbone of Egypt, as the Wei River and later the Yellow River basin was at the birth of China. In front of the river, constructing a dam is nothing more than an attempt to create an artificial endorheic basin.

River basins are also natural infiltration routes from the sea: the Neolithic entered Europe via the Danube, as the Ottomans will do millennia later—the First Crusade will take the same route in reverse.

The Romans entered Hispania via the Ebro and the Moors via the Guadalquivir, and from the tributaries of these rivers, they branched out their strategy of conquest and domination.

The simple fact of going up rivers (Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio and St. Lawrence) gave the French control over an area of North America far greater than that controlled by the English, while the Belgians were able to dominate what is now Congo-Kinshasa thanks to the Congo River and its tributaries.

Even the Vikings had the great, easily navigable rivers of the East to thank for their domination of the Russias or their arrival in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate of Baghdad. Thanks to the rivers of Western Europe, the Vikings were able to reach such important cities as Paris, Seville and Pamplona.

The Pearl River was the gateway for British influence in China, and the Yangtze for Japanese influence. Further south, the Mekong was crucial to incorporate Indochina into the French Empire.

In South Africa, the Orange, Vaal and Limpopo rivers were key to Boer expansion. The Zambezi basin gave its name to Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company’s geopolitical project in the African interior, which was called Zambesia before being renamed Rhodesia.

The conflicts in Rwanda were also about a river basin struggle (Nile vs. Congo), as in Darfur (Nile vs. endorheic basin of Lake Chad) and today in northern Nigeria (Niger vs. Lake Chad).

Nor is it necessary to recall the extent to which the fertile basin of the Duero provided the backbone of Castile at the time of the Reconquest, the central role of the Ebro in the Spanish Civil War, the role of the Vistula (whose internationalisation was even proposed) and its mouth, the free city of Danzig, in triggering the Second World War, or the importance of the Amazon and the Rio de la Plata for several South American states.

As for North America, the river system of the Mississippi basin plus the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway provides more kilometres of navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined, as well as feeding and surrounding the largest continuous stretch of arable land on the planet, making it a de facto island.

In early 2014, the conflicts in Crimea and Ukraine turned our eyes back to the river basin map, revealing the huge silhouette drawn by the Don River basin, which easily geo-blocks into the Kerch Strait, separating Crimea from Russia. The most pro-Russian part of Ukraine coincides suspiciously with the Ukrainian region of the Don basin. Almost confirming this, the Don Basin People’s Militia (Donbass), a pro-Russian paramilitary group, was formed in these areas.

Shanghai, Hong Kong, Macao, Alexandria, Antwerp, Rotterdam, London, Gdansk, New Orleans, New York, Buenos Aires, Dhaka, Calcutta, Cairo and Ho Chi Minh City all have in common that they owe their importance to dominating places where a large basin meets the sea. Nor can the development and history of inland cities such as Moscow, Kiev, Volgograd, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Basel, Paris, Milan, Rome, Budapest, Belgrade, Montreal, Asunción or Chongqing—or in Spain Valladolid, Zaragoza, Toledo, Madrid, Seville or Córdoba—be understood as part of the rivers over which they preside: yet another reason not to underestimate the importance of river systems.

For all these reasons, in States worthy of the name, what happens in their river basins, especially when they are shared with other countries (as in the case of Egypt-Sudan-South Sudan-South Sudan-Uganda-Ethiopia, Bangladesh-India, Burma-China, Vietnam-Cambodia-Laos-Thailand-China, Spain-Portugal, Holland-Germany, Ukraine-Russia or Brazil-Paraguay-Argentina-Uruguay), is a matter of national security.

To give examples, Serbia was stripped of its Mediterranean outlets after it conflicted with NATO, but they could not take away the Danube (a navigable river and therefore a river connection that broke the isolation to which NATO wanted to subject Belgrade), and if Ethiopia and/or Uganda were to do something ‘weird’ at the source of the Nile, they would strangle a nation of 80 million souls in a tremendously effective way.

The same can be said of Turkey, which can take 90% of the waters of the Euphrates from Iraq by diverting it. Syria was also in a position to pressure Israel over the Jordan Springs issue—until Israel invaded and occupied (to this day) the Golan Heights.

Pakistan, too, has tensions with India over the fact that India controls an upper reaches of the Indus River, on which Pakistan’s irrigation systems depend, although its sources are in Tibet.

Perhaps the clearest example is Bangladesh, an unviable state with an ultra-dense and explosive demography (150 million inhabitants, more than Russia, concentrated in a territory the size of Nepal, ultra-flat and low-lying, very sensitive to flooding and rising sea levels), which is completely dependent on the Ganges River, which in turn is controlled by India. As we saw in the article on the Libyan war, the struggle over aquifers and water sources is an irresistible geopolitical reality and will become increasingly so as humanity driven mad by economic and techno-industrial growth pollutes and squanders the planet’s freshwater reserves.

Between basins, there are always natural boundaries such as mountain ranges, or at least a clear watershed, so river basins delimit natural geographic domains. Thus, at the time of the Spanish Empire, the Crown of Castile corresponded essentially to the Atlantic basin of the Iberian Peninsula, while the Crown of Aragon corresponded to the Mediterranean basin: both entities had a geographical coherence that tended to give them political coherence.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire also suspiciously coincided with the Danube basin and the English Thirteen Colonies in North America with the Atlantic basin of the continent; one of the reasons England went to war with its colonies was because it forbade the colonists from crossing the Appalachians (the Proclamation Line), which would have made them break into the huge Mississippi basin, making them a continental entity that would more easily escape the heavily maritime power of London. In those cases where rivers lack this central role, they have a peripheral role as a border between states (the Rio Grande, the Congo, the Orange or the Amur), so their importance remains unquestionable.

When you stand in a conventional sea basin, following the force of gravity and the ‘easiest route’, the land invariably leads you to the sea, which is why it happens so often in history that when a country increases its political and economic power, producing a surplus of material power, it ends up going to sea. But there are other basins where the land leads… to the land. The peculiarity of endorheic basins is that if you are outside the basin, the land will never naturally lead you into it, and if you are inside, the land will never naturally lead you out; in this simple fact, there is an almost metaphysical significance: Heartland is, to all intents and purposes, a bubble, an anomaly, a contradiction in the general geographical system, which is governed by totally different and even opposite laws to those of the rest of the planet’s land surfaces.

Finally, in endorheic basins, the water dams the key to the ‘political order’ are already set by geography.